You need to convince your boss that Google AdWords is the program to invest in. And you can already hear the response.
“I’m not spending anything for PPC. It’s a crapshoot and a waste of money; you will be way over budget within a week. Who’s going to keep an eye on it?”
Don’t worry, this is going to be a piece of cake. Here are 7 points to show your boss that AdWords will work and that there are strategies and tools that help you stay within budget without a lot of work.
1) Bid Strategies
AdWords provides tools for flexible bidding strategies. You can automate your bidding by applying certain rules within AdWords to help you maximize your budgetary outlay. These rules control where, when, and how you want your keywords used across one or more campaigns.
You have your choice of 5 rules:
- Maximize Clicks - You select a target spend amount and AdWords will maximize clicks automatically while staying within budget
- Target Search Page Location - AdWords adjusts bids so your ads get to the top of the page or on the first SERP
- Target Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) - AdWords will set bids to maximize conversions while reaching your average CPA goal
- Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (ECPC) - AdWords calculates each click’s probability of conversion and automatically adjusts your manual bid up or down accordingly
- Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) - Maximizes conversions while seeking an average return on ad spend by bid selection
Bid Strategies helps decrease the time you spend manually dealing with bids.
2) Bid Rules
A bit like Bid Strategies, Bid Rules help automate your bids but instead of AdWords manipulating the bid to reach a desired end goal, you can set the bid rules yourself to match specific tasks like raising and lowering keyword bids based on various criteria or scheduling ads. You can set timers so campaigns begin at a particular time or you can set parameters to pause low performing ads or keywords.
3) Shared Library
The shared library allows you to set parameters for a particular situation, save it as a list, and then use that list of parameters across any and all campaigns. This means you only need to set these up once. Yay! Less work for you. These lists can include ads, audiences, keyword placement exclusions, and budgets.
4) Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)
Remarketing is not a bad word or a bad practice unless taken to an extreme. RLSA lets you determine when, whether, and how many times to show an ad to someone who has already visited your site before. You can even adjust the bid for the keyword up or down; you should be able to get the visitor a second time for less money. Or if competition is stiff for one of your products you can increase the bid amount for second and further showings.
5) Auction Insights Report
Here is where you can see how you are doing against your competitors. For each keyword you can find out:
- Average position
- Impression share
- Position above rate
- Overlap rate (overlap with competitor)
- Top of page rate
You can use this information to tweak your keywords and rules to perform better or to weed out those you can’t rank well enough for to return your investment in bidding.
6) Ad Extensions
This is a terrific way to convince someone to click on your paid placement ad instead of someone else’s. It enables you to easily provide more relevant information in the form of a specific type of link. It also lets you take up more room on the SERP, which is always an advantage.
As an added bonus you can show different extensions according to the time of day.
Ad extensions come in several flavors:
- Review extensions so you can use a quotes and reviews with your ad.
- Seller ratings to show off how you rate with other buyers.
- Social extensions showing the number of Google+ page followers you have.
- Sitelinks show links to specific website pages in addition to your landing page. These publish a brief blurb about the page.
Sitelinks is an especially helpful tool for maximizing conversions because the user can select your landing page link or a link to a popular page on your site to minimize navigation to a place of interest.
7) Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Why stick to one keyword per ad when AdWords can select from a list to match the keyword the searcher used? Your keyword is dynamically inserted into the ad by a piece of code that matches what the searcher used against the possible keywords in your list for that specific ad.
One caveat: make sure the landing page that link goes to is relevant for all those keywords. Your bounce rate will go up if searchers click on your ad and land on a page that has nothing to do with the keyword they used. High bounce rates = bad & visitors that stay = good.
Remember, your ad has to compete with at least 6 others with only the top 3 showing on the page. You want to get the ad shown to the right people at the right time without having to sit there and babysit your PPC campaign.
Something else to think about is that if your result is on the SERP both organically and with paid placement you just doubled your screen real estate for the price of one. Who can resist a BOGO?
Back to Your Boss
After presenting all these great money-saving tools that show just how little of your time AdWords will take, your boss will be asking you why you aren’t done yet. You’d better be ready to jump right in and start investing in your marketing using Google Adwords.
